Ventures in Clarion

Clarion is an IDE created and maintained by Soft Velocity.

Clarion has a nice little application configurator. It has a GUI to define a database as well as wizards and “templates” to build windows that can browse, lookup, add, edit and delete records. For the finishing touches it has a script-like language, capable of doing basic calculations, window customizations, enabling, hiding or making controls read-only, etc...

It is ideal for small custom projects, like keeping track of your personal vehicle expensis or gathering statistics of your lap-times when training for a marathon. As long as nothing fancy is needed, you can whack a working executable including database within an hour or so.

Opinion

While reading these articles you might think I'm terribly negative and totally against Clarion. That's not true, though I must admit that I would not like to run my business on the technology. However there are some basic ideas and structures in there that I actually like. Generally keeping things simple is the motto, and that's quite a good motto provided requirements are simple as well.